


Damn Heroes

by chaserzachsmith



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Dumbledore's Army, Friendship, Multi, about 400-500 word drabbles, adding tags as I go
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-03
Updated: 2019-01-14
Packaged: 2019-02-27 23:46:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 5,686
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13259136
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chaserzachsmith/pseuds/chaserzachsmith
Summary: After the war, the members of the DA try to make peace with their own actions.





	1. Seamus

Seamus has an Order of Merlin, second class, because he'd been tortured badly for helping Neville escape the Carrows. Dean by now has heard a dozen stories about the DA and thinks they all deserve the medals, but that's neither here nor there. The Ministry honours whoever it chooses.

The Orders of Merlin had been given out at the first Ministry Gala, which was also the Ministry Gala that had the best record of DA attendance. Even Dennis Creevey had gone. It's a shiny silver medal, encased in a frame and with a certificate of recognition. It just  _begs_  to be on a wall, in the place of honour or whatever.

Instead, it's in Seamus's sock drawer, where Dean finds it buried behind some socks of dubious cleanliness in the back.

"It's not like I don't respect the Ministry," he says,when Dean is brave enough to bring it up. "I mean, I don't respect them. But that's not the problem with it."

"Then what is?" Dean asks.

He knows Seamus is only this talkative because they're half asleep and a little stoned, and he knows Seamus is like to clam up if the conversation gets too touchy. It's near impossible to tell what's too touchy, lately.

"It's for being a war hero," says Seamus. He makes a sour face. "Whatever I am, I'm not a fuckin' hero."

Lately, Seamus swears without any vehemence. It's a sort of contrast from when he'd been fifteen and saying "fuck" because he  _meant_  it. He says it now like a fuckin' hero is the only kind of hero there is.

Seamus may not be a fucking hero, no last stands or glorious rescues or dramatics. Dean just wishes he could see the heroics in the little things. Seamus is a person of little things and little deeds, however much he tries not to be.

Dean has taken too long to reply, and Seamus must feel uncomfortable with the silence. "I wasn't a fucking hero," he repeats. "You have to be, I dunno. Noble."

"You weren't noble?" says Dean.

"No, course not," says Seamus. "I was telling the Carrows their mam must have been ugly."

Dean wants to laugh. "No wonder you looked so awful," he says.

"Neville was noble," says Seamus. "I was just stupid."

Dean wants to reassure him that he wasn't, but it would fall flat. Seamus has always been determined to belittle himself and it's no different now. "You want another cup of tea?" he asks instead. A truce, maybe. An agreement, that they can just leave the conversation there.

"Yeah," says Seamus. "Sure."


	2. Lee

 

 

 

He still runs Potterwatch out of his bedroom. It's not the same, of course. There's less risk of imminent death. And he runs it alone. Kingsley is busy being the Minister of Magic, Remus is dead, Fred is dead, and George is holed up at Shell Cottage and barely talking to Lee, let alone the fifty or so faithful listeners. It's just Lee Jordan, in the end, cracking jokes into his old microphone.

The day he and George reopen the store George turns to him, in the storeroom after they've closed. "Are you doing Potterwatch tonight?"

"Wasn't planning on it," says Lee. "You knew I was still-"

"I've been listening," says George, and smiles, sort of.

They still aren't brave enough to go up to the apartment, so they sit in the storeroom and Lee sets up their old equipment.

"For the first time since the Battle of Hogwarts, we've got a guest anchor," he says. "And we are  _finally_ able to introduce him properly. Here's George, former Potterwatch technician. The incompetent one who cut the February 12th broadcast short."

George hits Lee on the shoulder. "Hello, Potterwatch!" he says. George had never gone on the air before; Lee thought painfully about the first time they'd put Fred on.

"Our topic lately is the second war and its aftermath," says Lee. There's not much else to talk about. "Today, George and I reopened Weasley's Wizarding Wheezes, in Diagon Alley. It's doors have been closed for almost a year, since September of 1997, and we're excited to bring back some inappropriate noise and imagery back to the Alley. Any comments, George?"

George seems to think for a moment, then leans into the mic, suddenly earnest. "Yes, actually. Yes. We're moving on. We're going to be okay. Special discounts for current Hogwarts students and recent graduates."

"Well said, George," says Lee.

He is proud to have started Potterwatch, and to have continued it in the storeroom. He is proud to have made anybody laugh during the war, and in the days following it.

On the shelf behind the register is a photograph of Lee and the twins the day they'd opened the store. They grin crookedly on either side of him and he looks happy, happy like he's got nothing in the world to fear.

Next to it George puts a new one of them reopening the store, with the rest of the Weasleys and their friends standing round. George has an arm propped on Ginny's shoulder and Percy hovers at his other side. And Lee is crouched in front of them all, his arms spread as if to say "Come and get us," and they are all smiling almost as broadly.

"It's a good picture," says Lee, one day as George is going through the register. 

George glances over. "Ginny's got something in her teeth in that picture," he says. "She'd be so mad if she ever found out."

"You gonna tell her?" says Lee, who knows already that the answer is no.

"No."


	3. Luna

Luna is at the top of the Astronomy tower looking down at the courtyard and Ginny is standing next to her. They aren't talking much.

Her mother used to say that it was easier to think the higher up you were, and Luna has grown to hate being underground. The castle at night, with stone walls and heavy air, is almost as bad sometimes, and there's no solution but fresh, thin air.

"If you need fresh air you could always use one of the balconies," says Anthony Goldstein, maybe tired of her coming back into the Tower so late, but Luna needs to be as high up as she can, needs to look down at the earth and believe she is far far away from it. Luna needs to know that she is not trapped.

"I won't pretend to understand it," says Ginny, "but I believe you."

They are staring down at the school when Ginny says, "I think I get it."

"Do you?" says Luna.

"I know Auntie Muriel isn't Malfoy Manor," says Ginny, "but it's miserable to be stuck anywhere."

Luna nods and watches Professor McGonagall crossing the courtyard below.

She hates to admit it to herself but she resents that she'd been trapped for so long during the war. It'd been such a waste of her time, all those idle hours in the Manor.

All they'd done was talk, in the basement. Mr. Ollivander had talked about wandmaking and the first war and his brother and his father and the forests he'd used to hike through and his favourite bands from the 1940s and the way he organised his shop. Luna'd talked about creatures and the Rotfang Conspiracy and politics and her father and mother and Ginny and Neville. About the DA, and he'd told her he admired what she'd done with her friends.

Certainly she'd done more with the DA than she had at Malfoy Manor.

"You've got it all wrong, Luna," says Ginny. Their arms are touching, their breaths clouding in the chill.

"Have I?" says Luna. She thinks back to the basement- damp and mildewy, bare stone walls and floor and their rusty nail and empty bottle. Their collection, Mr. Ollivander had called it, a smile in his voice.

"Just cause you did more with the DA doesn't mean you wasted your time in Malfoy Manor," says Ginny.

"Please," says Luna. "Don't do that."

"Do what?" says Ginny, giving her an incredulous look. "I'm not kidding around."

"You stayed in an Order safe home," says Luna. "I was held hostage. There's a diff-"

"I never said it was the same," says Ginny. "I meant you weren't useless. What would Ollivander have done without you?"

Luna thinks about that.

Ginny leans over the wall, looks over the school. "It's so cold."

"Cold," agrees Luna.

"Why do you like it up here again?" says Ginny.

"Why do you?" says Luna absently. Ginny's right- if she thinks about it, she'd done something. She'd been there for Ollivander when he'd needed somebody to be there for him. That was something.

Ginny smiles. "We're breaking curfew. And I like you, Luna."

Luna can't help but smile at that, too.


	4. Justin

Justin thinks that his dog is the only thing in the world that listens to him.

Or maybe not. Maybe his dog is just the only thing in the world Justin can talk to. 

It's not about his friends or how he feels about them. The problem doesn't lie with his friends at all- the problem is with him, because he feels guilty complaining. After all, what would he say? "I feel bad that I got to frolic in America and learn linear algebra instead of getting tortured or chased around the countryside." It's a pathetic thing to whine about.

"I hate that I suffered so much less than you" is what he wants to tell them. It's at least what he feels. But then they would comfort him and he knows that of any of his friends, he needs comfort the least. After all, he's got his dog to talk to, his cigarettes to steady his hands, his job to distract him.

So instead he makes an effort to listen to his friends when they need someone to talk to. Even though it's less and less likely to be him. Susan's got her boyfriend, Hannah and Ernie talk to each other and to the rest of the DA more than to him.

"I feel like I've fallen out with my best friends, because I got to frolic in America and learn linear algebra instead of getting tortured or chased around the countryside." It doesn't sound like such a problem, does it?

He goes to the DA reunions when they happen but more often than not he leaves early, or he ducks out for a smoke just to relieve himself of the gloom inside.

When he is going with Dean Thomas- that's what they call it, going with. Not boyfriends and not a relationship and sure as hell they weren't in love- they smoke together in his apartment, the air hazy and slow. They talk about their lives- Dean living with Seamus Finnigan and attending university, Justin with his low-level job on his father's campaign.

They lie in Justin's small bed together and Dean talks, voice low and constant in the dark. "It's so hard," he says, "I mean, being Muggleborn."

"We did wind up fugitives," Justin points out.

"It's hard to be stuck into a whole new society and pulled out of ours," says Dean. "And now I'm not _really_ a wizard but I've been so distant from the real world too."

"The real world," echoes Justin.

"You know what I mean," says Dean.

"You could be in the real world for real," says Justin. The only light is from the gap between the blinds and the window and Dean's face is shadowed. "You could leave and never look back. That's kind of what I did."

"I doubt I could," says Dean.

"Why not?" says Justin, but he knows why, even though he's sure Dean hasn't guessed at it.

True to form, Dean doesn't reply.

Justin's dog is named Margaret and he'd gotten her from the pound. She's too old to do much, her face turning gray around her nose, but she's handsome in her way. She likes to rest her head on his leg and look at him. He almost imagines she understands when he talks to her.

"He's not listening to me," says Justin out loud, one morning after Dean's rushed back home. He scratches under Margaret's chin.

* * *

This one would not exist without my friend Emily, so many thanks to her.


	5. Dennis

The night the DA gets their Orders of Merlin is a night of stuffy ballrooms and dress robes and uncomfortable smiles and expensive champagne that's marked off-limits for the students who aren't yet of age. Just the fact that there are people being honoured who aren't of age yet shows a massive failure on the Ministry's part, but they are all pretending this isn't a political thing.

Dennis is not of age- he's fifteen for God's sake, fifteen- but he downs some butterbeer and refills his cup with something strong-smelling. He catches Hannah giving him a weird look, disappointed and worried, but he takes a swig and stares her down.

He is not happy to be here, but everyone else is here, even Michael Corner who had effectively dropped off the face of the earth after the Battle, so Dennis kind of has to be here. He's not going to let Michael Corner show him up.

The Ministry didn't give Orders of Merlin to just any old DA kid, so they didn't give one to Dennis. It wasn't enough to fight in the Battle or to stick it out through the school year, you had to be special. You had to have done something actually worthwhile.

It's cruel that Colin hadn't even gotten a recognition, even posthumously. You'd think that actively dying would at least get him a medal. But the Ministry apparently can't go around awarding every dead teenager, either.

Dennis sidles up to Ginny Weasley, who looks over at him. They are almost the same height- it's anyone's guess who's taller, even though he's two years younger, and she nods at him. "Hey, Dennis."

"Hi."

He doesn't know why he's so desperate to talk to her but he knows Colin had respected her, admired her, and that's enough for him right now.

"It's nice to see you," says Ginny. "How have you been?"

"Good," says Dennis.

"That's good," says Ginny.

Maybe Ginny Weasley is too much older than him, or maybe they haven't got enough in common, or maybe they just haven't talked in too long, and maybe the entire DA is spreading itself thin, no longer held together with panic or fear or communal suffering. Maybe this is it. Maybe now the DA will go its separate ways and they'll try to forget about that year. It'd be comforting if it didn't feelso impossible.

He says, abruptly, "Good talk," and goes to find Hannah.

She confiscates his glass once he's close enough and swigs the rest. "You're underage," she admonishes, and he shrugs.

"Is the DA falling apart?" he says, and she pauses, frozen in place holding his empty cup.

"Only so much as we let it," she says. "And I won't, Dennis. I won't let it."

Dennis nods, suddenly, overwhelmingly grateful for Hannah Abbott. "Good," he says.


	6. Zacharias

Zacharias Smith hadn’t been in the DA in October of 1997, but he remembers walking into the Great Hall and looking at the wall behind the staff table and almost laughing. At the time he’d thought it was just as stupidly brave as he'd have expected of Harry Potter's idiot Gryffindor friends.

"Look at that," he had said to Ernie. "It's so stupid. Do they think it'll help matters?"

"Stupid, yes," replied Ernie, and he smiled uncomfortably and looked sideways at Hannah. That was when Zacharias realized that, no, it wasn't just the idiot Gryffindor friends. It was _all_ of Dumbledore's Army, all of it. He wondered why Ernie and Hannah hadn't told him it was restarting.

He knew why.

He hadn’t fought in the Battle; he’d gotten the hell out of Hogwarts and then he’d gotten the hell out of Hogsmeade, too. He’d spent a whole year watching his classmates ritually tortured and that was by _teachers_. He had no illusions that it’d be any better in a fair fight.

He rather doubted, anyway, that it would _be_ a fair fight. A hundred Death Eaters trained to use Dark Magic and willing to kill versus a hasty army of morally uptight teenagers and fugitives? There was no chance.

And Zacharias, for all the Hufflepuff loyalty and goodness he's supposed to have, wasn’t brave enough to stare down death like that.

So he’d run.

He knows the DA must think pretty poorly of him-- he can’t blame them. He thinks just as poorly of them. Bleeding idiots, the lot of them. Marching off into a battle they’d had no chance at winning-- and in the end it’d paid off only because Harry fucking Potter had marched into the fray and saved the fucking world. It was so _typical_.

When he reads the papers these days he avoids the mentions of the DA. They make something sour twist in his gut. _You could have been a hero_ , it tells him, _but you weren’t, and nobody was surprised._

Shut up, he tells it, but it persists, nagging and bitter. He should probably see a therapist but he’d rather be gutted.

So he drinks, and lines empty bottles on the windowsill and around the kitchen like trophies. Maybe they are. Trophies for everything he hadn’t managed to be, that year. Trophies that attest grandly to his own misery, to his own failure to be the hero he pretends he never wanted to be.

On the anniversary of the Battle, when the DA’s reunion photo is blazoned across the front page of the Daily Prophet, he doesn’t even bother with the rest of the paper, just chucks it in the bin.


	7. Hannah

Maybe it's a Gryffindor thing, but the DA is driving her mad. They can't  _all_  resent themselves this much. To a certain extent Hannah can empathise- after all, she still frets about how powerless she is in the face of the real world, and how little she can help the other DA now that she can't do so by volunteering herself up as a martyr.

But at a certain point it's  _annoying_. Sometimes Neville will spiral into disgust with himself for every single person he hadn't saved in the Battle, or every student who'd been hurt over the course of the year, and Hannah has to take a deep breath before she tries to talk him through it.

Of course they hadn't been able to save everyone. Of course that was a shame.

But nobody in the DA gives themself any credit. Neville had taught almost ninety students how to cast a decent Stunning spell, Neville had plotted and directed the missions down to the dungeons, Neville had taken too many punishments in place of other students. Really, Neville needs to shut up and stop blaming himself for things out of his control.

At the gala, when they'd gotten the Orders of Merlin, she and the others had clustered together- Neville, Ginny, Luna, Anthony, Seamus, Michael. Hannah had rubbed a finger over the smooth edge of the medal, and Michael had read the inscription off his.

"For Defense of Ministry Values." He laughed shortly. "Like the Ministry has values."

The DA is quick to dismiss the Ministry- and Hannah is too, usually- but just then she'd wanted to appreciate it for a moment. It'd been a huge honour.

Sometimes she feels like she's the only one who's a little bit  _proud_  of that year. It's easy to focus only on the worst of it-- the worst of it had been undoubtedly awful. Even so, the DA had done a lot more good than any of its members ever acknowledge.

Hasn't it?

"I dunno," says Anthony Goldstein. She ought to be worried about him, staying at the Leaky Cauldron every day until the early morning. She's glad for the company, though. It gets quieter after midnight and he's good company. "We did a lot more  _bad_ than we acknowledge, too. It's good practice to just ignore both."

"I don't mean that we didn't all come out worse for it," says Hannah. "I just mean most of the time everyone talks about what we weren't able to do and not what we  _did_."

"Like how I Cruciated nine people?" Anthony counters. "Three of them weren't even third years yet."

Hannah's grateful she'd been Hufflepuff. After a point the Carrows had stopped trying with them and just used Ravenclaws and Slytherins. She and Anthony understand a lot about each other, but they both know she doesn't understand this. "I just mean, we were kind of impressive," she says. "We faced down Death Eaters. We escaped when they were hunting us down."

"We had pretty bad odds," admits Anthony, but he's not really agreeing with her.

It drives Hannah mad sometimes.

"You can't tell them how to feel about it," yawns Neville. "Everyone had a different perspective, you know?"

She knows, but still. "I wish they knew how incredible they were," she says. "I wish they knew how incredible we all were."

"Yeah," says Neville. 


	8. Dean

He had never realised quite how much the whole "magic" thing had taken from him. The year of his life spent on the run  _had_  to be the worst of it, and he hadn't considered that it was only the start. But now he is trying uselessly to be a part of both worlds- magic and Muggle- and failing.

And that starts with his stepdad's car.

He'd had tried to teach him when Dean had asked, but he had a job, and Dean was a very bad driver and needed a lot of teaching. He's too used to magic, maybe. You don't need to know how to do a three-point turn on a broom. You don't need to check over your right shoulder on a broom. You don't need to know pedestrians' rights.

Nope, magic has made Dean Thomas soft. Which is hilarious.

His sister Sara is a better driver than he is and she's three years younger, which is the real indignity. As he tries to make the short drive to the dentist, she's sitting in the backseat chewing gum and pointing out his many mistakes. Dean wishes fervently that he'd refused to let her along when she'd asked.

"You almost hit that car's mirror, idiot," says Sara. He hastens to adjust away from the parked car and veers onto the dividing line.

"No, stop!" says his dad from the passenger's seat. The car jerks to a stop before Dean remembers he's still supposed to be driving.

He's doing poorly as a Muggle but then he's doing poorly as a wizard too. He'd bought a new wand, sure, but he hasn't been to Diagon Alley since then. And he doesn't use it much, either, except for cleaning or cooking or Apparating, if he's in a time pinch.

"Pull over and let me drive it," complains Sara.

"We're trying to teach Dean to drive," says his dad.

"Ugh," says Sara.

After the war when he and Seamus had first moved in with each other, they'd been confident in what they were doing. Seamus going to the Aurors and Dean going to Hackney. It was a part of growing up, right? University, a job.

At home he and Seamus are trying to spare each other's feelings by avoiding any weird subjects. It doesn't leave them much to talk about, so Dean fills the silence with the classes he's taking, his professors and classmates, anything funny that happens, and eventually they both fall into a weird silence and just watch TV or play cards. Neither of them has brought it up, but they are not Dean and Seamus anymore. Not the same Dean and Seamus they'd been for nine years, at least.

"Turn your blinker on, moron," says Sara.

Dean turns his blinker on and merges.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Inspired partly by my younger sister being a better driver than me.


	9. Michael

Shortly after the most humiliating and gruesome experience of Michael Corner's young life, he'd lied to about twenty of the people he respected the most in the world. They'd been talking about bones, and breaking them (they were a morbid bunch) and he'd told them about how he'd broken his leg- badly enough that his tibia stuck out of his shin, mind- by falling out of a tree.

The thing was, he'd jumped. He'd tried to do a flip, even. He had been nine, and stupid, and it had worked on the Auror Erwin radio show, and he'd regretted it very quickly. But at eighteen, Michael was a Ravenclaw and had a reputation to protect, and he wasn't about to make himself out as the kind of idiot who tried to do flips out of trees. So he'd lied.

Shortly after his nineteenth birthday, Michael commits perjury. He is testifying against the Carrows, and he tells the Wizengamot that he'd been caught in the dungeons unaware. This had led, obviously, to his gruesome, humiliating torture. (And the torture was the point of the testimony, and it doesn't matter that Michael's lied about how he'd gotten there.)

Neville gives him a look that means he's noticed the lie.

He tries to explain himself to Neville, two and a half years after the war, but Neville is far less willing to cut Michael slack for the lie than Michael himself had been. Neville wants to know  _why_.

It was like jumping out of that tree, right? He'd jumped on purpose, and that changes everything.

If he'd fallen out of the tree on accident, then he doesn't look like an idiot. If he'd gotten caught unawares in the dungeon, then he doesn't look like a hero, and that's the way he likes it. He's not an idiot. And he's not a hero.

"You lost me at the part where you fell out of a tree," says Neville.

"I jumped," says Michael. "That's the point."

"No matter what you tell people, it doesn't change what actually happened," says Neville. " _You_  still know you went back."

The truth is that Michael does know he'd made that choice. He had been a hero, just for that moment. Michael knows that.

He just also knows that it was a fluke. He'd made his choice and then he'd spent the next day and the next week and the next month regretting it. He wouldn't do it again, not in a million years, not for a million twelve-year-olds. And he has no intention of forgiving himself for that and he has no intention of telling Neville, either.

Even if he doesn't want to be a hero, he really doesn't want to be a coward.

Michael gives up on explaining himself satisfactorily. He throws out an excuse. "I guess it's about the press." The press loves a teenage war hero and Neville knows it too well.

"Ugh, the press," says Neville, and they drop the subject.


	10. Parvati

Lavender is asleep, so Parvati pulls up a chair between two beds and pulls out a book to wait. Even a few weeks after the battle, the hospital still smells a little like smoke. At the far end of the room Ritchie Coote has brought Romilda Vane a sundae and they are awkwardly trying to share it. It's so painfully teenaged that Parvati has to look away.

She had spent the last year watching as Lavender slowly stopped dancing around Seamus's feelings and Seamus's temper, as Lavender had started to call him out when he was unfair, or reckless, or stupid. And now, as Lavender is sinking deeper into some kind of similar depressive fog, she knows it's her turn.

But so far she's done nothing. She doesn't want to lose her friend, maybe.

"Hey," says Lavender, faintly. "You're early."

"They closed up for the day," says Parvati. "They wanted to bring in proper experts to put the towers back in order." Perhaps wisely, McGonagall didn't trust teenagers with the repair of badly damaged structures seven or eight stories up.

"Ravenclaw?" says Michael Corner.

"And Astronomy," says Parvati. "Parts of Gryffindor."

"Hm," says Michael.

"I wish I could help out," says Lavender.

Lavender had taught herself healing spells, and shut up Seamus when he was mean, and sat in silent sympathy in the common room waiting for people to come back from the dungeons, and argued Crabbe into forgetting to give out detentions. Lavender had helped a lot.

But Lavender doesn't want to hear that, so Parvati doesn't say so.

"If they're fixing up the Gryffindor tower," says Geoff Hooper, "You should tell McGonagall to replace all the drapes. The ones in our dorm had holes."

"They're replacing a lot of things," says Parvati.

"Well they should get the drapes too," says Geoff.

"They should replace my face too," says Lavender, which shuts everyone up.

It's just another day on the Spell Damage ward with the Spell Damaged teenagers, just like the last few weeks. As it starts to empty- first Romilda Vane goes home, and then Geoff and Lavender, then Michael, until the day Parvati comes by and is greeted with an almost empty ward, the only bed occupied by someone who'd been hexed by his neighbor.

Getting out of the hospital had done wonders for Lavender's attitude, and they go round Hogsmeade and Godric's Hollow, window shopping and eating out and usually bored to death.

"We're not doing anything with our lives," says Lavender. "There's the few of us in the Aurors, and then there's the rest of us killing time."

"We'll get there," says Parvati.

"Whatever," says Lavender. She sounds like Seamus when she gets like this.

"Are you going back to the school?" says Parvati.

"I don't know," says Lavender. "I don't know anyone who does know."

"Anthony and Susan are," says Parvati. "Maybe Ernie too."

"Lucky them," says Lavender. "They know what they want in life."

"We do too," says Parvati.

She doesn't elaborate and Lavender must have her own ideas, since she doesn't ask. "I guess we do," she says instead.

It's nothing big, maybe. Just two girls outside the stationery store, just a little bit of thought put towards the future. Parvati squints up at the sun, then glances to the side at Lavender, her vision still a bit too bright.

"We should go back to school," says Lavender. "Widen our options."

"Yeah, we should," says Parvati.

"I wonder if they changed the drapes," says Lavender.

"They did," says Parvati.


	11. Hermione

She is sitting in the dining hall on the first day of her eighth year, chin in her hand. The night before had been as much melancholy as celebratory. They’d had to acknowledge both the end of the war, and the cost of it. All the students who could come back to Hogwarts, and all the students who never would.

At the Hufflepuff table Hannah Abbott is talking animatedly with her friends. She’d cried during the feast last night but she seems alright now. Her Head Girl badge is pinned crookedly on her robes’ lapel.

“Sorry,” says Ginny, sliding into the spot opposite Hermione.

“Hm?” says Hermione, looking at Ginny.

“Head Girl,” says Ginny.

There is a pause before Ginny adds, “That’s why you were looking at her, right?”

“No,” says Hermione.

She wasn’t hurt that she hadn’t been made Head Girl. She wasn’t jealous. But there was still a part of her that wondered why. The other part of her that knew that it was something she’d never get, something to do with the last year and with the DA that hadn’t been on the run.

“I thought you were gonna get it,” admits Ginny.

“It’s not a big deal,” says Hermione. She and her friends may have saved the world but most of Hogwarts still remembers her mostly as a nuisance.

With Ron and Harry with the Aurors she doesn’t know where she fits in. She may have had the idea for the DA but she had missed the entire last stage of its development. She hangs out with Ginny but Ginny’s got other friends.

She goes on a Prefect Patrol with Anthony Goldstein that night; he’s quiet, and lets her check in every room as though he’s positive there will be nothing to find.

“Why aren’t you Head Boy?” she asks, two hours in. Hands in pockets, he regards her thoughtfully and then looks down.

She lets him think before she prods again. “You were practically guaranteed it.”

There is another pause. She has given up and moved onto the next classroom when he finally says to the opposite wall, “I told McGonagall I didn’t want it.”

Hermione hadn’t expected that. “Why not?”

He twists one hand into his hair uncomfortably, looks somewhere over her head. “I-- d’you know last year they’d pick us out and tell us to torture each other?”

“I’ve heard that,” says Hermione.

“Yeah,” says Anthony. “Well. I did it. Nine times.”

Sometimes Hermione thought she understood things. And sometimes she found out that her classmate she’d just spent two hours with had tortured children. “Oh,” she said.

“They stopped asking Gryffindors and Hufflepuffs,” he says. “After a while. But they’d still ask us.”

There is another brief pause. Hermione tries to decide whether she still likes Anthony. She is leaning towards “no” when he says, “You know why Hannah got Head Girl?”

“Because she was…” says Hermione. “Here, helping.”

“Hannah didn’t compromise her morals,” says Anthony. He makes a face. “I mean, not a lot of the DA did. Outside of Ravenclaw, at least.”

Hermione had compromised a few morals herself, last year. She knew Harry and Ron had, too.

“You asked _Anthony_?” says Ginny. “God, he’s such a downer. Don’t ask him things.”

Hermione shrugs. “I thought it’d be comparable. I guess not.”

“If he didn’t get Head Boy it was because McGonagall knew he didn’t ever stand up to the Carrows,” says Ginny. “Not when it counted.”

“He gave it up,” says Hermione, although privately she'd agree with Ginny's assessment.

Ginny sits on that. “Oh,” she says.

“I’m glad I didn’t get it,” says Hermione. "I wouldn't have."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If your hyperspecific fanfiction niche ain't broken... hahaha.


End file.
